US Wants Death Penalty for Alleged USS Cole Plotter

American military prosecutors Monday asked a senior official to approve
charges against a Guantanamo detainee for his alleged role in the
attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. That and a variety of other
terrorism charges against the man could carry the death penalty. VOA's
Al Pessin reports from the Pentagon.

The prosecutors have
requested the charges against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen
of Yemeni descent, who is among 14 men the U.S. government considers
"high value detainees." The men were held by the Central Intelligence
Agency in secret prisons before being transferred to the military-run
detention center on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba two
years ago.

The Pentagon says al-Nashiri worked with al-Qaida
leader Osama Bin-Laden to organize and carry out the attack on the U.S.
Navy destroyer Cole, which killed 17 American sailors, and an attack on
a French supertanker two years later, as well as a failed attempt to
attack another U.S. warship. He is the first person to be charged in
the Cole attack.

Under the military commissions process, a
senior Defense Department official, Susan Crawford, must now decide
whether to approve the charges, and whether to allow prosecutors to
seek the death penalty, as they have requested.

The case may be
complicated by the fact that the CIA has admitted using abusive
interrogation methods on al-Nashiri, including waterboarding, a partial
drowning technique which the U.S. government has considered torture in
the past. At a hearing on his status last year, Nashiri told a
military judge he was tortured by U.S. interrogators, and only
confessed to involvement in the Cole attack and other terrorist
operations in order to get the torture to stop.

But the legal
advisor to the military commissions, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann,
says the case may go forward in spite of questions about evidence
obtained through waterboarding.

"You have to look at the
evidence," said General Hartmann. "We will look at the evidence, all
the evidence that is associated with the case. While there has been an
admission that there was waterboarding, there may well be other
evidence in the case. That's not necessarily the only form of evidence
in the case. So it's inappropriate for us to judge one piece of
evidence or the other. All the evidence will come in and it will be
evaluated by the defense, by the prosecution and by the judge."

General
Hartmann says Nashiri will now be provided with a military attorney to
help plan his defense. If the charges are approved, he is entitled to
a preliminary hearing before a military judge within 30 days, and to a
trial before a jury of U.S. military officers within 120 days. He can
appeal any verdict in the regular U.S. federal courts.

Nashiri
is the 20th man to have charges recommended by the Guantanamo
prosecutors. Several trials have already started, including one for
five detainees accused of involvement in the September 11th attacks on
the United States in 2001.